Time for our businesses to adapt to the new workplaces
If, in your board meetings, you were listening to your team uttering phrases like “considering”, “planning”, or “assessing” transitioning to a more digitised way of doing business then the recent COVID-19 situation will have forced you to speed up any sort of assessment.
The businesses that are still trading, and mostly flourishing, are the ones that weren’t focussing on their traditional working practices. They were the ones that were already embracing the new suite of digital platforms available to us all, and adapting every facet of their business to be as user-friendly as the tools we use in our everyday life.
Businesses have woken up to the fact that everyone now expects their work life to be as simple and straightforward as their personal life. It doesn’t matter if you are a B2C artisan gin distillery or a B2B HR platform: the ones that have been flexing their digital muscles are the ones that are forging their way to the front of the pack.
Taking cues from the trail blazers
There are countless examples of outstanding digitised user experience across just about every parts of our lives, and B2B businesses have been playing catch up with their consumer cousins for some time now. We see examples of amazing user experience in the consumer world every day including:
- Amazon’s one click ordering
- Setting up a new Apple iPhone
- Contactless cards and Apple Pay on your phone
- Renting a house on AirBnB
- Starting a new current account on Monzo
- And ordering your fresh food delivery that arrives at a time to suit you.
Where we’re seeing digitisation success
We have a very broad client base here at DPC+UP and as they get used to working from their dining room tables and hastily constructed home-offices, we are seeing the more-digitised businesses genuinely reaping the rewards.
One of our clients who have always sold training courses for their products are building some e-learning courses for remote instruction and accreditation. Using Adobe Captivate (and an e-learning expert) we are taking their courses into customer’s homes as well as hosting Q&A sessions with experts via webinars.
Another client, MicroBarBox, an online retailer of cocktail gift boxes has partnered with a gin tasting experience (Madam Geneva & Gent). Along with with Zoom’s fantastic video conference capabilities, they have taken the gin-tasting parties into their customers dining rooms (I have to admit that this has been the best “testing/tasting” for a client that I have ever had to do…).
It’s not just our traditional consumer eCommerce clients who are reaping the rewards, many of our B2B clients have implemented online product ordering. We’ve been using a number of slick eCommerce platforms that allow their customers to order and re-order effortlessly.
Even if your customers don’t have to pay for goods online, the eCommerce platforms that we use work just as well for B2B clients. This is a lot to do with the fact that they have many of the features needed “out of the box”:
- Tier pricing for different clients
- Quantity pricing
- Loyalty scheme
- One-click re-ordering
- Comprehensive product search including AJAX auto-predict search boxes
- Multi-lingual sites all running from the same platform
- Orders emailed to purchasing with PO’s attached
Most of the solutions however are rooted in two common features: MANY of them have implemented a flexible and feature-rich eCommerce platform, but ALL have enhanced their online communication channels.
Getting to grips with new tools
As a global cloud based agency we have a team of around 200, the majority who work remotely, and we have found ourselves well-positioned to advise our clients on our methodology and platforms that make our company work on a day to day basis. We talk to clients about:
- how we use Slack for inter company discussions and project communication
- how we use Zoom for face-to-face meetings and webinars.
- how we use a whole suite of online products for time-management, project management, client requests, invoicing and collaboration.
Our parent company, UP THERE, EVERYWHERE, has been helping one of our biggest clients, Galderma Aesthetics, with what is emerging as a very common problem in these times:
How to stay relevant to our customer-base in these locked-down times?
The travel bans and social distancing had made their usual communication channels redundant, so UP devised, produced and hosted a suite of webinars for their customers with phenomenal results. This morning, our general manager hosted 3 webinars for them across timezones on ‘how to optimise your website’. They had an audience of over 1,000 Health Care Professionals for each session. Creativity can take its form in many ways, and none better than the ‘creative use of technology’!
Can we do things better?
Now, more than ever, is the time where we should all be asking ourselves, can we do things better by using the digital tools that are ubiquitous in all our lives?
Can we make our work-lives as easy as our personal lives?
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